Telegraph View: Over the past 20 years, Europe has gained the freedom not just
to elect or dismiss a government but also to have access to an incomparably
wider range of goods and service.

It is for historians to discern the origins of the most momentous event in post-war European history. But the path to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago today will surely lead through the election of Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Krakow, as Pope in 1978 and the emergence in Poland of Solidarity under Lech Walesa. In Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost (opennness) and perestroika (restructuring) after coming to power in 1985. Four years later, liberalisation gathered an unstoppable momentum. The opening of Hungary's border with Austria from May onwards allowed hundreds of East Germans to escape to the West, the most notable instance being the Pan-European Picnic, a peace demonstration held in August under the patronage of Otto von Habsburg. Within four months the wall was breached, a watershed from which flowed the collapse of Communism in Europe, the re-unification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Two decades on, former Communist countries account for over 40 per cent of Nato members and all of them have contributed troops to the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Ten of them have joined the European Union, and two more are candidates for membership. Separated from half of the Continent by Stalin's brutal diktat, they have come in from the cold. That historic process has not been without grave setbacks. The unravelling of Yugoslavia was accompanied by the hideous practice of ethnic cleansing, culminating, at Srebrenica in 1995, in the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. Today, of the republics which made up the old federation, only Slovenia is a member of both Nato and the EU. In Russia, the freewheeling chaos of the Yeltsin era has given way under Vladimir Putin to a nasty combination of nationalism, crony capitalism and scant regard for human rights. And the former Soviet satellites have been hit particularly hard by the current economic recession, the average estimated fall in their GDP this year being 6.2 per cent.

Yet those setbacks cannot disguise the immense advance of freedom in Europe over the past 20 years, freedom not just to elect or dismiss a government but also to have access to an incomparably wider range of goods and services (see the graphic image of East Berliners sitting behind the wheels of BMWs cited in today's newspaper by Adrian Bridge). Yesterday we remembered the men and women who have given their lives, from the Somme to Helmand, in defence of our democratic values. Their sacrifice reminds us that freedom should never be taken for granted. It is not a static concept, rather one which constantly ebbs and flows and demands unceasing vigilance.